Real or Fake #10
Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.
PHILIPS WOUWERMAN (copy after?)
Man on Horseback, Chantilly, Musée, Condé
PHILIPS WOUWERMAN (copy after?)
Group of men with two horses and dogs, British Museum, London
This month’s ‘real or fake’ section does not offer the usual choice of right or wrong, but instead highlights a group of problematic drawings linked to the Dutch artist Philips Wouwerman. Evidently drawn with skill, this group of red chalk figurative studies, many of which are monogrammed, were exhibited as autograph works by the artist in a monographic exhibition of 2009-10. Many of these figures can also be directly connected to those in autograph paintings. But did Wouwerman really draw with red chalk?
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PHILIPS WOUWERMAN
Travelers in a Landscape with a Urinating Horse, c. 1655, Location Unknown
PHILIPS WOUWERMAN
Hunter Talking to a Gypsy Family Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Collection of the Count of Schönborn
Dr Annemarie Stefes provides the most comprehensive overview of this curious group of drawings in an article in Master Drawings, published in 2019.
Annemarie Stefes ‘Did Philips Wouwerman Draw with Red Chalk?’, Master Drawings, Winter 2019, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 453-472.
“What was considered in 2009–10 to be a coherent group of red chalk studies by Wouwerman is not so coherent after all, with several different hands involved.”
“In my opinion, these red chalk “studies” are drawn in a manner that sets alarm bells ringing. There is nothing sketchy about them, no sense of a searching line. Although left partially unfinished, the motifs—often floating in empty space—are represented as finished details in nucleo, the figures fully modeled, with light and shade consistently applied. Lacking spontaneity and devoid of pentimenti whatsoever, their rendering betrays all the hallmarks of a copyist working from painted or printed prototypes. Indeed, Hind had already expressed reservations in attributing the British Museum sheets to Wouwerman, describing them as drawn “with no freedom of style,” either being early works or copies of independent drawings by another hand. In 2001–2, David Mandrella labeled the two drawings in Chantilly as copies; the drawing in Cambridge is catalogued on the Fitzwilliam website as a copy after a painting; and, most recently, the traditional attribution of the entire group to Wouwerman was also questioned by Plomp and Schumacher. Adding to suspicions are the monograms themselves. Inscribed in brown ink, they were apparently added after the red chalk drawings were completed. These monograms, written in the form that was used by Wouwerman only after 1646 (even though some of the related paintings are of earlier date), could have been copied from any drawn or painted model of that later period. Above all, the mise-en-page of the motifs on the red chalk drawings implies that they are details extracted from larger narrative scenes. Indeed, it is possible to support this idea with “hard” evidence in many, if not most cases, namely by matching the motifs to details in specific paintings by Wouwerman.”
